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Blog Post: The Death of Ugly Enterprise Apps

Quotes like this give me hope for the world of enterprise-level software. While it seems like something said five years ago, this was said just recently by Dave Knox, CMO at Rockfish:

“Startups are now applying best-in-class lessons learned from the consumer Internet and applying them to enterprise/B2B products… . Technology is happening at the consumer level first, [whereas before] people experienced new technology at the office. So employees expect the UX of enterprise software to be the same (if not better) than what they experience in their personal lives.”

A new age of consumerism is making it’s way into the world of big-enterprise apps. In the past, legacy finance, ordering, and management applications (just for starters) were given to employees with zero consideration to user experience. The color scheme reminded us of going to work in coal mines, and latency was never spoken of. I think we all remember when CTOs had the attitude, “I don’t care what it looks like, my employees will use it regardless.”

Oh, wait, they still talk like that.

Thankfully, there are some companies trying to change this mindset. This article by Tech Cocktail highlights efforts by companies like Rockfish to help employees get more out of their work experience.

Now, if you have worked for large organizations like myself, you must be thinking to yourself why this revolution is happening. It’s not like executives decided to do this all by themselves. No, the change came because they stopped buying mobile devices for their employees, bringing on the era of BYOD.

When an employee started making their own decisions on mobile devices, they have in essence given themselves the power to decide on the full suite of tools to accomplish their daily backlog of work. Gone are the days when only one piece of software exists to accomplish a task. Many of them are also free – or so cheap employees are paying out of their own pockets to choose better tools.

Executives are taking notice. To create better engagement by their work force, they must create better pieces of software. Thank goodness, if I was forced to look at yet another gray-schemed CRM tool I would have started breaking things.

My name is Chris Murman, thanks for visiting my space.
As an IT consultant, I am constantly in search of ways to make the work we do better. This means bringing a lean focus to the products we make, a holistic approach to agile business processes, or an intense focus on the technologies of tomorrow.
This blog is a collection of all thoughts related to those, and many more endeavors. Come participate in the conversation with me!